If Key Visual Arts and the visual novel adaptation revolution formed one emerging strand of the “slice of life” drama genre, one of the other main strands surely belongs to the spawn of Fuji TV’s Noitamina block, whose debut title was Honey and Clover—the anime that defines the second part of my fandom as much as Evangelion did the first.

Honey and Clover, ostensibly aimed at young women who were not the usual audience for anime, actually turned out to be a narration of what the transition to adulthood meant for many young men—myself included. Most of the fans of the show I knew were men, and the show is told predominantly from a male point of view. The characters were students, artists, unemployed, wanderers, people stuck in their early to mid 20s and wondering where life would take them next. It was decidedly not sci-fi, fantasy, or anything other than an eloquent, well-told, funny and dramatic reflection of life: and not just about relationships/romance but also work, self-identity, and even calling.

Watching Honey and Clover, especially the insightful monologues, was catharsis all over again. But it was catharsis of a different sort than with Evangelion. It may not be an accident that so many Evangelion AMVs are scored with Linkin Park, the anthem of mainstream “you don’t understand me!” teenage angst: it functions more like a cry and a violent outpour of negativity. Honey and Clover is sadder, yes, but also prettier, gentler; reflective and hesitant on the part of many of the characters, especially Takemoto with his “tower of adolescence.” It’s indie pop rather than hard rock, literally in its soundtrack/insert songs and in its effect.

The Noitamina block succeeds, in my opinion, precisely because it’s not being written for otaku. Most of the shows that are featured are aimed at drawing a new audience for anime—the exception that proves the rule recently is one of the notable misfires, Fractale—and starting with the josei audience it gradually expanded to include daring sci-fi outings like Eden of the East and C and unconventional comedies like Moyashimon and experimental shows like Mononoke. It was, in short, where chances were being taken in anime, and brought prominence to the kind of well-written storytelling that Honey and Clover and the recent AnoHana embody. It’s gotten to the point where many fans, like myself and other bloggers, will automatically give a Noitamina show the benefit of the doubt for quality. It represents, for the most part, the best face of modern anime.

That, of course, is only one part. But it was not Honey and Clover alone that got me back into fandom, and led to the founding of this blog. It was two other shows, two that are reflective of our age in both its promise and its problems. I refer to Welcome to the NHK! and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.

The very first review posted on the site that would become Anime Diet was on one of the final episodes of Welcome to the NHK! That show was notable for several things: it was emotionally raw in the way that Evangelion was, at least for this viewer, in exposing the failures and foibles of being a socially-challenged adult otaku. It was, in a way that was largely unseen up to that point, meta: about fandom and anime and gaming itself, even more than the restrained and realistic Genshiken had foretold because it included so much of the pathology that underlay some of it. In that sense it was also about anime’s tropes and their effect on the lives of the characters. The catharsis I felt was both powerful and familiar. This, not H&C, was really my second Evangelion, though at the end of the day, I rate the former higher than the latter.

Why? A clue might be found in the other show that I found in that golden year, 2006: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It was Ray who recommended it, on the strength of the super-meta episode 0, an assault on prevailing anime standards as much as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” was for the classical music world. It was boldly amateurish—meticulously so!—and smart-aleck and self-aware at new heights. It sharply divided viewers at its release, and it even had me checking to see if it was the right show I had gotten. Haruhi Suzumiya works in large part because its fundamentals—the characters, the central plot, the quality of the animation as well as the jokes—are strong. But it is special because it played openly with fandom tropes—the moe girl, the cosplay, a Rei Ayanami clone, etc—and did it cleverly, with a touch of sci-fi that seems drawn from absurdist philosophy and perhaps Douglas Adams. No matter how dumb many of its imitators have been, Haruhi was smart. It was funny, and, in the quieter moments, a little bit moving.

The final broadcast episode of season 1 was just a day in the rain, with nothing strange or climactic. It was ordinary life, lived together with a few interesting people. It was the purest slice-of-life that could be found.

Notice what is missing from all of these shows: the fantastic. High quests. Speculation about the future or magical powers, aside from a few touches here and there mainly for parody/comedy. The goal of these shows was to, even in skewed ways, talk about “real life” in ways that were more down to earth. The mood is more interior, in ways that shows like Evangelion foretold but now became the norm, and insular too, in its self-referential humor. There has always been meta humor in anime, of course—the early Gainax was doing it in the 1980s, there was Project A-ko, etc.—but Haruhi institutionalized it. It also institutionalized the “slice of life” approach as a permanent option, even for relatively experimental shows like itself (and it failed when it overreached in experimentation, as in Endless Eight).

All the while, what was happening in comedy was also shifting, and the emblematic show was Azumanga Daioh. It did not follow the traditional sitcom-like format of a show like Ranma 1/2 or Kimagure Orange Road; instead, it was an all-female cast doing strange things in short vignettes, trying to capture the brevity of a four panel comic strip. Azumanga Daioh was one of the funniest shows I had ever seen up to that point, and I was surprised when I became teary-eyed at the end, because it turned out that these charming oddballs had grown on me as characters. They say in writing classes that one way to make your characters likeable and empathetic is through humor, and Azumanga had that in spades. And boy, did it work: the cuteness, the surrealism, and even the strange language jokes seemed to mesh together well. I still watch it sometimes when I need to feel better, when I need that healing laughter medicine.

Azumanga Daioh is the final godparent of modern slice-of-life anime. So many shows have followed its format since then, especially shows that purport to be “moe”: Lucky Star, K-ON!, Nichijou, just to name a few very famous recent examples. They are comforting, these shows about goofball cute girls doing cute things. The related iyashikei subgenre is really a distillation of this sort of show where nothing much happens at all except pleasantness; it just subtracts the the slapstick humor. Whether the successors of Azumanga are as good is a debatable point, but what is undeniable is that it is now a powerful current in the shape of anime today. The extreme popularity of the three shows I mentioned just before is a testament to that.

Conclusion

So what does this all mean?

It does not mean that sci-fi and fantasy is dead. Far from it; there are many great SF/fantasy shows that have been produced in the past several years, including high profile titles like Gurren Lagann, Macross Frontier, Kaiba, Haibane Renmei (which has slice of life elements to it but is a spiritual parable at its heart), Eve no Jikan, the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex series, and many more. Madoka just proved that a show in the older style can be successful; it dethroned Haruhi as the most discussed anime on 4chan, after all. But it is no longer the main face that anime presents to the world, and those shows, while they have many fans, are not the ones exciting fans and discussion the most. A director like Akiyuki Shinbo, who is the visual heir of Hideaki Anno, might in earlier times produced an Evangelion or a Utena; instead he produces shows like Pani Poni Dash! and Madoka, which are deeply self-aware otaku concoctions.

It also means that the committed audience, at least the ones that are driving popularity polls in otakudom and in the blogosphere, has shifted. And I am both a witness and participant in that shift, mostly because my own life has changed. The places that I identify with and seek comfort in are no longer filled by a show like Evangelion, nor is a brain tease like the original Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments: Lain mean the same thing as it once did. Simply put, ordinary life and a reflection of it mean more to me than they once did. It doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the other kinds of titles—every one I listed in the paragraph above is a favorite. But different things speak to me than before.

I suppose my hope is that Noitamina and shows like it, perhaps like Hanasaku Iroha, will continue their march of quality. There is much in this age that is now generic and shopworn, something my colleague here has rightfully raised concerns about. Thing is, though, all art goes through phases. The mid-to-late 2000s have belonged to slice of life, and moe; perhaps we are entering a new phase now, of who knows what. But as I grow older as a person and as a fan, I still want to be surprised. I still want to be delighted and moved and provoked by animated art, with strong characters and plots and visuals. And, occasionally, if it speaks to my life in a way that I can understand and identify with, I want to be changed.

Simple to ask for, I know; hard to do. One can only hope.

This is part of 21stcenturydigitalboy’s ongoingDiary of an Anime Lived series, which is a blogosphere-wide series of articles about the intersection of anime and personal life.

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15 thoughts on “Diary of an Anime Lived: The Slice-of-Life Age, Part 3 (FINAL)”

It’s amazing, I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve seen who love Eva, Haruhi, and NHK, in that order, and were strongly effected by them. It’s like they form a natural chain. I’m the exact same. Aug 06 – Eva becomes my favorite anime. Dec 06 – Haruhi slides in right behind it. April 07 – NHK takes my top spot. And all this just leading up to my burst into real otakudom. This must be some kind of generational mark.

Thank you for the link! I’m both surprised and not surprised that many have gone down a similar pathway. I think anime fandom tends to attract a certain kind of person in certain life stages in the English speaking world, at least. There’s also the matter that it was around the turn of the millennium that Cartoon Network in the US began to air a lot of anime, and anime began to bust out of its underground status right around the time Evangelion’s popularity was peaking.

Thanks for the kind comment :) As for Welcome to the NHK, be warned that it is quite dark and deals with some rather unpleasant subjects…but intentionally so. It is not an idealized look at the worse social pathologies of a social outcast, and in fact it’s toned down from the manga (which in turn is a bit more hopeful than the original novel). What it shares in common with Eva is the focus on broken people making their way in the world, and it’s refreshingly honest and raw. There aren’t many shows like that anymore.

I drifted away from anime watching for a couple years. There were plenty of shows I heard about that sounded interesting… but I didn’t feel compelled to sit down and actually watch them. Especially because with comics and visual novels, I could read stories at my own pace.

But then I finally joined an anime club in my area, and they got me to focus enough to watch Bakemonogatari and Summer Wars. Both were pretty good. And I’m slowly getting back to watching videos on my own… while I don’t always completely focus on what’s going on, I’ve finally been able to enjoy Mahoromatic and Kimikiss.

Welcome back to the fold :) Before my second (current) phase of fandom, I was never particularly keen on keeping up with the latest anime, but as a blogger now I’m always looking for the next fix in each season. There’s always so much to watch now it has ironically made me a lot more selective than I once was; I usually end up following no more than 2-3 shows max per season, if that.

Summer Wars is one of my favorite anime films. Bakemonogatari is odd but is also very charming. Kimikiss had its ups and downs, though on the whole I thought it was quite good (I wrote a whole slew of articles on that show if you care to search the archives). I watched Mahoromatic actually in my first fandom phase and felt it was the first time Gainax had begun to “settle”…though it had some good moments. That’s just my point of view.

Nice read all the three articles, and for me it was the same, the first anime to stroke me was eva altough it was not my first anime, and then welcome to the NHK did stroke me in a very different way, i like it both equally, but i think, IMHO while i do agree that anime evolve like you rightly put it, i think till this day is an open space for all type of anime in my eyes sci fi or slice of life, i like innovation to see something new, even if it is moe or not, i think anime needed this as a form of enterteinment, to have different trends in order to evolve and survive as an industry, i want more fantasy stories, sci fi, slice of life, dark and mature stories in any form and for that i will support this entertainment to the fullest.

As long as people are creative there will always be something new and exciting. There’s so much that anime can do that live action can’t do as well visually, and I always hope to see exciting, innovative work as well simple well-told stories—or, better, both.

We support the industry best by buying the product, talking about it, and keeping the flame alive.

Great post, as always, hoss. I have seen all the shows you mentioned except Honey and Clover, and as I read this trilogy of posts, I found myself coming to the same conclusions you did, subconsciously. It’s amazing what impact a seemingly pedestrian media form like anime had on my life. It’s changed my outlook in ways nothing else has (certainly not any other form of media.)

Great trilogy. The greatest series I’ve read besides Wintermuted’s Analog Diary. Yes, the advent of slice of life age, finally a genre for soshokukei has arrived. Calm, peace, tranquility, a small scale happiness, not a metanarrative, a grand epic type like Eva, yes, small narratives, conducive to eco. But if I may need to be picky, pure slice of life iyashikei anime is not enough for me. I have to see some sort of romance involved in a humorous way, yes, rabukome (romantic comedy) since divinity is romance, therefore, divine comedy is romantic comedy.

I didn’t know Madoka toppled Haruhi in 4chan. These shows are masterpieces. But it’s beyond my comprehension. The final episode of Madoka was just way beyond. So, I’m expecting Diet intellectuals will analyze and write about it here.

It actually topped Madoka on 2chan, the Japanese one…not sure about 4chan (the American board). Which is pretty amazing.

You know I agree, I need more than just calm pleasantness too—I need conflict, character, plot. Story, in short. Something like Aria might be nice once in a while but I can’t imagine being the main source of my entertainment. I think believable relationships are gold, and there aren’t enough of them in anime.

I’ve read your writings and i feel the same way. NHK and Haruhi are both my favourites.(i like maid sama as well). i’m a teenager so i can only afford to watch these in animax. u have any idea when they might again be telecasted in animax?